“So are you,” interrupted Arthur.
“I know I am; I love them. I’d like to talk to you about reincarnation and astronomy, of which I know something, and even astrology and the survival of the dead and lots of other things. But I have got to make my way in the world, and I’ve no time. You think me a heavy bore and an old fogey because I won’t go to parties to which lots of those nice fellows ask me. Do you suppose I shouldn’t like the parties and all the larks afterwards and the jolly actresses and the rest? Of course I should, for I’m a man like others. But I tell you I haven’t time. I’ve flouted my father, and I’m on my honour, so to speak, to justify myself and get on. So I mean to pass that tomfool examination and to cram down a lot of stuff in order to do so, which is of no more use to me than though I had swallowed so much brown paper. Fool-stuff, pulped by fools to be the food of fools—that’s what it is. And now I’m going to shove some spoonfuls of it down my throat, so light your pipe, and please be quiet.”
“One moment more of your precious time,” interrupted Arthur. “What is the exact career that you propose to adorn? Something foreign, I think—Indian Civil Service?”
“No, as I have told you a dozen times, Indian Army.”
“The army has points—possibly in the future it might give a man an opportunity of departing from the world in a fashion that is generally, if in error, considered to be decent. India, too, has still more points, for there anyone with intelligence might study the beginnings of civilisation, which, perhaps, are also its end. My friend, I, too, will enter the Indian Army, that is if I can pass the examination. Provide me at once with the necessary books and, Mrs. Parsons, be good-hearted enough to bring some of your excellent coffee, brewed double strong. Do not imagine, young man, who ought, by the way, to have been born fifty years earlier and married my aunt, that you are the only one who can face and conquer facts, even those advanced by that most accursed of empty-headed bores, the man or the maniac called Euclid.”
So the pair of them studied together, and by dint of private tuition in the evening, for at Scoones’ where his talent for caricature was too much for him, Arthur would do little or nothing, Godfrey dragged his friend through the examination, the last but one in the list. Even then a miracle intervened to save him. Arthur’s Euclid was hopeless. He hated the whole business of squares and angles and parallelograms with such intensity that it made him mentally and morally sick. To his, as to some other minds, it was utter nonsense devised by a semi-lunatic for the bewilderment of mankind, and adopted by other lunatics as an appropriate form of torture of the young.
At length, in despair, Godfrey, knowing that Arthur had an excellent memory, only the night before the examination, made him learn a couple of propositions selected out of the books which were to be studied, quite at hazard, with injunctions that no matter what other propositions were set he should write out these two, pretending that he had mistaken the question. This Arthur did with perfect accuracy, and by the greatest of good luck one of the two propositions was actually that which he was asked to set down, while the other was allowed to pass as an error.
So he bumped through somehow, and in the end the Indian Army gained a most excellent officer. It is true that there were difficulties when he explained to his aunt and his trustees that in some inexplicable manner he had passed for Sandhurst instead of into the Diplomatic Service. But when he demonstrated to them that this was his great and final effort and that nothing on earth would induce him to face another examination, even to be made a king, they thought it best to accept the accomplished fact.
“After all, you have passed something,” said his aunt, “which is more than anyone ever expected you would do, and the army is respectable, for, as I have told you, my grandfather was killed at Waterloo.”
“Yes,” replied Arthur, “you have told me, my dear Aunt, very often. He broke his neck by jumping off his horse when riding towards or from the battlefield, did he not? and now I propose to follow his honoured example, on the battlefield, if possible, or if not, in steeplechasing.”